Backup Your DNA Using Bitcoins

Genecoin is a 'service' that will reportedly take your sequenced DNA, turn it into digital data and then store it in the Bitcoin network keep it 'safe' for all time.

It wants to back you up. In bitcoin.

Now from the outset, let's just state outright that this sounds ludicrous -- which means it's either the work of some maniacal geniuses OR it's another one of those slow-burning PR stunts for a film that won't appear for five years.

Either way, it's also kind of fascinating. The site claims that it'll take your DNA, digitise it, and then spread it out on everyone's computer so that they can share the burden of storing it.

"Bitcoin is really a networked ledger - a way to permanently store information on thousands of computers around the world. Every computer that mines for Bitcoins stores this ledger, which makes it an extremely robust way to backup data. We have a number of strategies for encoding your genome data as Bitcoin transactions."

The site then goes on to suggest that DNA uploading will become such a 'thing' that ultimately people will start using the data as a means of ranking how important you are on the web.

Essentially the higher rank you have, the more your data is spread to other computers and -- technically -- the safer your DNA will be.

As we said at the start, this sounds suspiciously like total nonsense, but the very idea that it's putting forward is actually quite interesting.

With biometrics increasingly becoming the final say in security there's nothing that says we won't be using our own DNA as a way of paying for things, or indeed showing our social status online.